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I'm on the newest Win10 and am looking for a way to delete folders which only contain one file, the thumbs.db, and nothing else.
I've read several things in this thread (which is now closed) where some didn't help and others were too painful to be even tried (why should i have to boot in safe mode?).
Is there a easy way to delete those folders?
I'm often succeeding with restarting explorer.exe from the taskmanager's app tab (wondering why explorer.exe is the only process offering "restart" in its context menu) and then being quick enough to delete such folders before explorer grabs em again. But there are always some hard ones which somehow escape this hack.
For such the only working thing i know of is to actually end all explorer.exe processes, delete the folder from a cmd line with rmdir /S/Q "foldername" and restart explorer.exe. But both approaches are a pain because usually i have many explorer.exe windows open an don't like to restore them all manually because that's a waste of time.
Is there a proper way to delete those folders which doesn't involve hacking the registry, changing system wide settings, booting from a linux live cd or killing explorer.exe? After all their empty so i don't understand why there's the need to hold on to a thumbs.db which by then shouldn't contain any thumbs. Maybe there's a purge-unused-thumbs option somewhere?
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Hello. I have NOOOO idea why this work for me but thank god it does.
I can't delete them but very weirdly, I can rename them.
After that, I can delete them.
Just don't try to delete them first, it increases the lock-out permissions or something and you can't edit after that until some time goes by. I don't know the trick number required for that time.
Give it a try.
Have you tried the batch file a the link below?
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/5655-clear-reset-thumbnail-cache-windows-10-a.html#option2
NO. I just tried to download it and ran it in error without looking at the code.
My desktops went black and required a crash to get out of it.
I don't know why that happened, but the code looks harmless to my novice brain. All was good after a reboot.
Is there a bit of an explanation of how this works?
thanks
Open your File Explorer.
Click on the View Tab.
Check File Name Extensions.
Go to the folder containing the .db thumbnail file.
Rename the file to .dat
You can now delete the thumbnail and then delete the folder.
NO. I just tried to download it and ran it in error without looking at the code.
My desktops went black and required a crash to get out of it.
I don't know why that happened, but the code looks harmless to my novice brain. All was good after a reboot.
Is there a bit of an explanation of how this works?
thanks
Open your File Explorer.
Click on the View Tab.
Check File Name Extensions.
Go to the folder containing the .db thumbnail file.
Rename the file to .dat
You can now delete the thumbnail and then delete the folder.
